Websites or apps not working earlier? Here's why

A more than four-hour outage with one of the country's biggest Internet host providers Tuesday caused websites and apps to stop working in the eastern United States.

Internet users started reporting problems with online services that utilize Amazon Web Services S3 servers just before 1 p.m. Sites and apps tied to the cloud-based services were inaccessible and many gave an error message.

AWS posted this message on Twitter:

S3 is experiencing high error rates. We are working hard on recovering.